


The One Where They Get Turned Into Penguins

by thedeadparrot



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Crack, M/M, Penguins, ducklings in charge of the department
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-08
Updated: 2009-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-02 04:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedeadparrot/pseuds/thedeadparrot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>House and Wilson get turned into penguins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Where They Get Turned Into Penguins

**Author's Note:**

> My apologies to the SGA fandom for stealing their crack. And to Linus Torvalds for stealing one of his lines. Many thanks to queenzulu and savemoony for the betas.

Wilson was turned into a penguin on Thursday, right before the weekly board meeting, and House thought that there had never been a better excuse to skip out on it, though he wasn't sure Wilson-the-penguin understood English at all. It wasn't like he could speak it or anything like that.

No one was exactly sure how Wilson got turned into a penguin, but House was the one who found him in his office, surrounded by a pile of clothes, squawking a bit and waving his flippers.

House wondered if this meant he could steal Wilson's stash of candy or if it would be more appropriate to go for his weed.

He made an attempt, but all that got him was bitemarks on his forearm.

* * *

Wilson was actually quite pleasant as a penguin, House realized. He wasn't as preachy as he was as a human, which House thought was a big plus, though he did have a tendency to honk really loudly whenever he thought House was poppingtoo many Vicodin at once.

"Oh, shut up," House said. "It's not like I'll start listening to you _now_."

The look Wilson gave him may have been a glare, but House was hardly an expert on penguin expressions, so he couldn't really tell.

* * *

Wilson really liked tuna. "Honk loudly and wobble a bit" levels of like. House liked giving him tuna, though, so it all worked out in the end.

"Stop abusing him, House," Cuddy said, her arms crossed across her chest. She was watching as Wilson tried to to peck a tuna tin to death, in an attempt to get at the fish trapped in the edges.

"I'm not!" House insisted. "I gave him tuna!" He tried his innocent face, but he suspected that Cuddy had been immune to that one for a while. He ducked as the tuna tin came flying up, and Wilson started honking in an annoyed manner.

"Do you even know what species he is?" Cuddy asked.

"He's a _penguin_," House said. "What else do I need to know?" Wilson looked like a penguin; he flapped like a penguin; he honked like a penguin. House had seen _March of the Penguins_. He knew what they looked like.

Cuddy rolled her eyes on the way out, which House counted as a win, though he did look up "penguin" on Wikipedia in an attempt to pinpoint the species, but he somehow ended up at the entry for "[wet t-shirt contest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_T-shirt_contest)" instead.

* * *

House decided to let Wilson chill in his office while he worked, because he was sure Wilson would get bored in his own. Wilson was mostly unobtrusive, though he did go skidding around the office on his belly, occasionally running over the minions' feet. That mostly pissed Cameron off, though Foreman seemed to like it. Chase generally just moved his feet out of the way. Cameron spent most of her time glaring at the other two.

"It really doesn't bother you that there's a penguin at our differential?" she said, with a bit of a hiss at the end of her voice.

Chase shrugged.

"Nah," Foreman replied. "Penguins are cool."

* * *

House was rummaging through Wilson's desk for the candy stash much later (Wilson himself was hidden in House's office. House's locked, inescapable, office. House wasn't paranoid at all, but it never hurt to be too careful), when he stumbled upon a small, metal box with a solitary button on it.The words DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON were printed in all caps underneath.

House turned it over in his hands a few times, inspecting it and wondering where the hell Wilson had found it.

Then he pressed the button.

And then he got the oddest craving for fish.

* * *

Cuddy was pissed. Really pissed. Pissed enough to consider homicide of the first person she saw. In this instance it was Chase. "What do you mean they're both penguins?" she yelled when Chase broke the news to her before her morning cup of coffee.

Chase flinched. "We found him in Wilson's office, and he's definitely not Wilson. He left his cane there too." He fidgeted from where he was standing by the door, trying to spot exits from the corners of his eyes.

Cuddy glared at him, because she didn't have anything else to glare at. "Well, fix them!"

Chase looked slightly terrified, and he nodded mutely before bolting out of the room.

* * *

"So we're just supposed to figure it out?" Foreman asked when Chase told him the news. They were seated around the conference table in their usual configuration, though there was no one at the board. The penguins were on the far end of the room, closer to House's office, doing their penguin thing.

Chase shrugged, though with a bit of the shell-shocked expression of someone who had faced down Cuddy and lived to tell the tale. "Yeah, I guess so."

"How the hell are we supposed to do that?" Cameron asked. They were all watching as House and Wilson did some sort of elaborate penguin ritual. It was weird, with odd sorts of bowing and offering each other various objects, mostly from really bad places. Like the wall, for instance.

So far, the three of them managed to figure that Wilson was the shorter penguin with the eyebrows, and House was the taller one with the grumpier disposition.

Foreman sighed. "The same way we always do, I guess." He stared morosely as House offered Wilson some strands of the carpet.

Now Cuddy really was going to kill them all.

* * *

"Thoughts?" Foreman said. He was at the white board, writing SYMPTOMS: EATS FISH; SLIDES ON BELLY; FEATHERS in his neat print. It was still only about an hour after House was turned into a penguin, and both the penguins were asleep standing up in the corner, snuggled close to each other, their necks entwined. Cameron tried really hard not to find it cute.

"I like aliens," Chase piped up. Foreman wrote a second column for POSSIBLE CAUSES: and put ALIENS underneath.

"It's not aliens," Cameron said. She was flipping through a thick book on penguins.

Chase gave a her a look. "It _could_ be aliens. You never know." He was fiddling with his pen.

"Why would aliens turn them into penguins?" Cameron insisted. It made no sense. Not that anything made sense, but the aliens thing was going a bit far.

Chase shrugged. "How should I know? Do I look like an alien to you?" In the corner, Wilson had a wide, penguin yawn, and tucked himself closer to House. Cameron was sure that shouldn't have been as adorable as it was.

Foreman rolled his eyes as they sniped back and forth and wrote CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIENDS/WIVES underneath the ALIENS.

"I guess that is more likely," Chase conceded, when their attention finally returned to the board. Cameron nodded in agreement.

* * *

It snowed the night before, so they left House and Wilson out on balcony, where there was ice and snow for them to slide around on. House, especially, seemed particularly gleeful, as he skidded into the snow covered walls, shaking it off as he stood up.

"It'll remind them of home," Chase said, as Foreman did his best to herd the penguins out the door. Since Foreman's confession during differential, they'd been letting him do most of the grunt work involved with taking care of penguins, and Foreman definitely seemed to like penguins a lot less now.

Cameron rolled her eyes. "They've never been to Antarctica."

"But, I mean," Chase said, "they're penguins." He made a gesture toward the door, which was closed, since Foreman was successful with his herding efforts. He was glad he wasn't stuck doing any of that.

"Doesn't mean they've been to Antarctica," Cameron said.

It was that moment when Foreman walked in looking a little traumatized. "I think they're having sex," he said. Chase patted him comfortingly on the shoulder.

"I thought you liked penguins," Cameron said as she rifled through the papers on House's desk. The browser on the computer was opened up to the Wikipedia entry on "[automated erotic stimulation devices](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_machines)", and she was doing her best not to look at it. Or think about it. Or think about thinking about it. _Stare at the desk_, she thought. _Stare at the desk_.

Foreman shook his head as he sat down. "There are things a man does not to see in his lifetime," he said. "And his boss having penguin sex is one of them."

Chase nodded in agreement. "Seriously, that stuff is traumatizing." He sounded like he spoke from experience.

Cameron glanced up. "I thought you hadn't been alone with them yet," she said. "When did you get a chance to see them?"

Chase shrugged. "I haven't."

"So, you've had other bosses that have been turned into penguins?" Foreman asked.

"No, not really," Chase said, wincing.

Foreman and Cameron exchanged a horrified glance. "You have the weirdest sex life ever," Foreman said. "I don't even want to know."

* * *

Cuddy didn't seem willing to give them any cases while both House and Wilson were incapacitated with sudden-onset turning-into-a-penguin (Chase wanted to call it 'penguinitis', but he was vetoed by pretty much everyone ever), so they were stuck taking care of Wilson and House as they ate fish and slid around on their bellies, honking every so often.

They also had surprisingly large amounts of sex, according to Cameron, because watching them apparently brought on bad flashbacks for Chase, and Foreman claimed that he needed therapy now anyway.

They didn't like the vet they managed to track down either, for some reason. Wilson was kind of vicious, and one of House's wings seemed to hang limp at his side most of the time.

"I'm not sure what's going on with this one," the vet said from the doorway to the balcony, pointing to House, who was opening his beak in what could only be described as 'a threatening manner'. "But I think there may have been some kind of problem with his wing."

"How do we fix it?" Cameron asked.

The vet sighed. "I don't think we can." She shrugged. "We could try getting a sling on it, but he doesn't seem to be cooperating."

"We could try to get Foreman to sedate him," Cameron suggested. "That might help." She glanced in Foreman's direction.

Foreman was not fond of that idea. "You can try," he said, crossing his arms across his chest and glaring.

"How hard can it possibly be?" Chase asked from where he was sitting at the conference table.

Foreman glared. "Have you ever seen an angry penguin charging at you at a hundred miles per hour?"

* * *

Eventually, they made Chase do it, and while he got beat up a little, the people in the ER insisted that the scars would fade in a few years.

So House waddled around the hospital a bit grumpy, but with his wing in a sling, while Wilson waddled around after him, and the people in the hospital got used to seeing them after a while, though they did have to convince more patients that they really weren't on hallucinogens.

They once made the mistake of letting House and Wilson into the fountain on the ground floor of the hospital, and most of the fellows blamed Foreman for that incident, though he insisted that he just hadn't realized that there was a reason why House's flipper was in a sling. The floor in that section would never be the same, and the Howards had threatened to sue, but Cuddy, at that point, just sighed and paid them off from House's legal fund.

Mostly, the fellows gave the penguins tuna.They had to feed the two separately, because House liked to steal Wilson's food, and that got him pecked in the belly, which made him honk loudly, and that just gave everyone a headache they didn't need.

They started working on cases again, and House would honk really loudly when they did something really wrong, and Wilson would honk really loudly whenever it was obviously cancer. For the rest of the time, they were tossed out onto the balcony so they could have sex.

"Do you think they used to do it this much before?" Cameron asked, late one afternoon after an exhausting case. They were camped out on the couch, trying not to fall asleep and ignoring the noises coming from the balcony.

"Do you really have to remind me of the fact that my boss is having penguin sex?" Foreman replied irritably.

"Sor-ry," Cameron muttered.

* * *

In the end, it was Cuddy who figured out how to turn them back.

She had been searching through Wilson's office, trying to neaten it up a bit, looking for the source of all their grief, when she stumbled upon a box, not very unlike the one House had found earlier.

This box had the words PRESS THIS IF THE MORONS PRESSED THE OTHER BUTTON written underneath it, and Cuddy rolled her eyes as she pressed it.

Suddenly, out on the balcony, Wilson found that he was very cold. And that he really wanted pants.

House mostly wanted more fish.

* * *

"You two are in so much trouble," Cuddy said to them. "So, so much trouble."

House was unrepentant. Wilson, at least, had the grace to look a little ashamed. "We were turned into penguins, so what?" House asked. He was slouching in his chair, looking oddly smug.

"I'm giving you both extra clinic hours from now until the day you die." Cuddy replied.

Wilson sighed and looked away. House said, "Whatever. I'll give them to Cameron."

"You probably shouldn't tell her your secret plans, you know," Wilson said, looking up at the ceiling and sighing again, for effect. (House suspected that the thing Wilson missed most about being a penguin was the sighing.) "You're the shittiest evil overlord ever."

* * *

It was good to be back, House thought. He liked not wearing a sling and being able to make fun of the trained monkeys in his spare time. It was annoyingly hard to be right all the time when no one could understand you. He missed sliding around on his belly a lot though. And the sex, too.

Wilson was off being responsible, confirming that yes, he was far more lame as a human than he was as a penguin.

"C'mon," House said, when he found Wilson straightening up his office (probably hiding his candy stash in another location, that sneaky bastard). "I want to go get some food." It was just about dinner time, and it wasn't like Wilson had anything better to do.

"Yeah, sure," Wilson said, while he moved stuff around. "In five minutes? And what were you thinking?"

House leaned into Wilson's personal space and licked his neck, grinning as Wilson jumped in surprise. "I was thinking seafood."

 

FIN.


End file.
